


Wire Song

by icarus_chained



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hope, Immortality, Introspection, Loneliness, Love, Pain, Technology, connection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-01
Updated: 2013-07-01
Packaged: 2017-12-16 19:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ghost in the wires, the voice unheard in the silence. Jack Frost had watched the world be joined together, and listened to it leave him behind. But even the voiceless can sing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wire Song

**Author's Note:**

> I stumbled across [this fanart](http://rosdottir.tumblr.com/image/37125193219) by Rosdottir, Jack Frost perched on a telephone wire, and was struck by a moment of whimsy. Um. My apologies.

The wires sang. 

More than wind, more than the plucked notes of strings stretched out across the landscape. They throbbed underneath his feet, swaying songs in phantom voices, humming like the pulse that no longer lived beneath his skin. The wires sang with the memories of words and the phantom touches of a thousand connected lives, messages whispered across the darkness, chiming silver in the moonlight.

For a moment, curled atop a swaying pole, pale fingers anchored by ice to that thin thread of connection, listening to the wind and the voices weave a song in unison, Jack felt again that pure, hollow note of longing that had crept upon him all those years ago.

He remembered these. He remembered watching them go up, the rise of saplings across the countryside, wires strung across their shoulders, bearing up the weight of words as they marched onwards into the darkness. Thread on thread of whispers spreading out into the world, linking life to life and holding hands together across thousands of miles of shadows. Painting grey bars across white snowfields, following the steel tracks of trains and the dark ribbons of roads, joining up what had always before been separate. Reaching out as though all the silence of the world meant nothing, and drawing close all those things that mattered most.

They had sung to him, when he first saw them. They had whispered to him of voices he had thought would never speak his name again, touched memories and hopes and spiralled them up into a breathless, desperate need. He had wanted them, then. To know them, to understand them, to find the means by which they whispered into willing ears and the places in which their voices might become his. He had longed to touch them, to thread his ice across them, to whisper words into their windsong and have them carry his voice to someone who might _hear_. To someone who, for the first time in so many years, might listen to his voice and know him for who he was.

He had become the ghost in the wires, then. He had been the phantom that traced the high paths, the weight of pale feet striking notes from strung strings, an ice-sprite dancing across the web of words in hopes of leaving his mark upon it. He had been the signal-man playing desperate, delighted songs, the hum and the thread and the wind snatching laughter from his lips as he patterned out words in pulses beneath his feet. He had been the chime of icicles and the flights of birds, the white noise echoing out across the lines. He had been the music and the music-maker, the wind his constant companion, singing silent songs the length and breadth of a world. The ghost and the phantom and the whisperer on the wires, all those things had he been.

But not heard. Not then, not ever. Not by the wires, not by the lights, not by the voices in the darkness and the ears that waited for them. Year on year and wire on wire, the inexorable march across the vastness of the world, and still ... still, he had not been heard. Jack Frost, the silent shadow man, voiceless in a world now wrapped in song.

It had hollowed him, that song. It had struck him like a staff striking icicles, shattering him into a note rung in silence, making him an empty bell in which laughter echoed dimly. Though he had fought, though he had lived, though he had danced other dances and sung other songs, wrung laughter and made its echo his refrain, still it had struck him through. Those threads in the darkness, and the hopes that he had spun from their singing. In all the long years of this strange half-life, never had he felt so utterly alone as he had then, listening to voices that would never know his name, watching all the world hold hands beneath him and only the pale shadows of his footprints to mark his passing across them.

He remembered that now. Curled atop his swaying perch, the windsong in his ears and the wiresong beneath his fingers, he remembered that pulse of connection he had never been able to make. For a moment only, he remembered that hollow longing. Light as air, light as laughter, he touched pale hands to the singing wires, and then ... 

Then looked up above them. Crouched smiling, a song in his heart and laughter on his lips, Jack looked up. Not to the silent moon who had always taunted him in his self-made stillness. Not to the wires stretched across the darkness or the lights of listening ears. Not to the threads of songs he would never sing.

He looked instead to golden ribbons, the curling streams of sand as they trickled down across the sky. He looked to a golden web spun from a golden cloud, to the bright wonder of the man at its center, to the small hands and silent laughter of a spirit as voiceless as he. He looked to joy, to love, to friendship, to dreams. He looked to threads that curled open at his touch, spilling sand and signals and love across his fingers, wires that carried no words but spoke to him nonetheless. He looked to whispers in the stillness that were his and his alone, looked to the smile on the Sandman's face and the soft delight in his eyes.

And felt, for the first time in centuries, that the wiresong hadn't made him hollow at all.


End file.
